Volcanic arcs form by deep melting of rock mixtures

Beneath the ocean, massive tectonic plates collide and grind against one another, which drives one below the other. This powerful collision, called subduction, is responsible for forming volcanic arcs that are home to some ...

Weird earthquake reveals hidden mechanism

The wrong type of earthquake in an area where there should not have been an earthquake led researchers to uncover the cause for this unexpected strike-slip earthquake—where two pieces of crust slide past each other on a ...

New study upends a theory of how Earth's mantle flows

A new study carried out on the floor of Pacific Ocean provides the most detailed view yet of how the earth's mantle flows beneath the ocean's tectonic plates. The findings, published in the journal Nature, appear to upend ...

Crack in Pacific seafloor caused volcanic chain to go dormant

From his geology lab at the University of Houston, Jonny Wu has discovered that a chain of volcanoes stretching between Northeast Asia and Russia began a period of silence 50 million years ago, which lasted for 10 million ...

What makes the Earth's surface move?

Do tectonic plates move because of motion in the Earth's mantle, or is the mantle driven by the movement of the plates? Or could it be that this question is ill-posed? This is the point of view adopted by scientists at the ...

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